(AP Photo)
(CNSNews.com) – American women born in the early 1980s are 33 percent more likely to have earned a college degree by the time they reach 27 years of age than their male contemporaries, according to the results of a longitudinal study published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The study also showed that women in that age group who started college were more likely to have completed it.
“Thirty-two percent of women had earned a bachelor’s degree, compared with 24 percent of men,” said the BLS. The 32 percent of women with college degrees was 8 points–or 33.3 percent–more than the 24 percent of men.
“In total, 70 percent of women had either attended some college or received a bachelor’s degree, compared to 61 percent of men,” BLS said. “In addition to being more likely to attend college, women were more likely to have finished their college degree. Of the 70 percent of women who started college, 46 percent completed their bachelor’s degree by age 27. In comparison, of the 61 percent of men who started college, 39 percent had completed their bachelor’s degree.”
The study is based on a series of surveys conducted among 9,000 men and women who were born in the years from 1980 through 1984. They were first surveyed in 1997, when they were 12 to 17 years old. In 2011-2012, they were interviewed for the fifteenth time, when they were between the ages of 26 and 32.
The survey also found that men in this age group were slightly more likely than women to have dropped out of high school. “Nine percent of men were high school dropouts compared to 8 percent of women.”
